Great Throughts Treasury

"Most artists, whether in religion, music, literature, painting, or what not, are shopkeepers in disguise. They hide their shop as much as they can, and keep pretending that it does not exist, but they are essentially shopkeepers and nothing else."

"Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it."

"Mr. Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he wisely refrains from saying whether they are good or bad things."

"My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine."

"My notes always grow longer if I shorten them. I mean the process of compression makes them more pregnant and they breed new notes."

"Neither have they hearts to stay, Nor wit enough to run away."

"Neither irony or sarcasm is argument."

"Nevertheless, I knew that I could get it to agree with me if I could so effectually buttonhole and fasten on to it as to eat it. Most men have an easy method with turtle soup, and I had no misgiving but that if I could bring my first premise to bear I should prove the better reasoner. My difficulty lay in this initial process, for I had not with me the argument that would alone compel Mr. Sweeting to think that I ought to be allowed to convert the turtles — I mean I had no money in my pocket. No missionary enterprise can be carried on without any money at all, but even so small a sum as half a crown would, I suppose, have enabled me to bring the turtle partly round, and with many half-crowns I could in time no doubt convert the lot, for the turtle needs must go where the money drives. If, as is alleged, the world stands on a turtle, the turtle stands on money. No money no turtle. As for money, that stands on opinion, credit, trust, faith — things that, though highly material in connection with money, are still of immaterial essence."

"No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there."

"No Indian prince has to his palace more followers than a thief to the gallows."

"No matter how ill we may be, nor how low we may have fallen, we should not change identity with any other person."

"No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction."

"No one thinks he will escape death, so there is no disappointment and, as long as we know neither the when nor the how, the mere fact that we shall one day have to go does not much affect us; we do not care, even though we know vaguely that we have not long to live. The serious trouble begins when death becomes definite in time and shape. It is in precise fore-knowledge, rather than in sin, that the sting of death is to be found; and such fore-knowledge is generally withheld; though, strangely enough, many would have it if they could."

"Nobody shoots at Santa Claus."

"Nothing is so cruel as to try and force a man beyond his natural pace."

"Nothing will ever die so long as it knows what to do under the circumstances, in other words so long as it knows its business."

"One can bring no greater reproach against a man than to say that he does not set sufficient value upon pleasure, and there is no greater sign of a fool than the thinking that he can tell at once and easily what it is that pleases him. To know this is not easy, and how to extend our knowledge of it is the highest and the most neglected of all arts and branches of education."

"One great reason why clergymen's households are generally unhappy is because the clergyman is so much at home or close about the house."

"One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once."

"One reason why it is as well not to give very much detail is that, no matter how much is given, the eye will always want more; it will know very well that it is not being paid in full. On the other hand, no matter how little one gives, the eye will generally compromise by wanting only a little more. In either case the eye will want more, so one may as well stop sooner or later. Sensible painting, like sensible law, sensible writing, or sensible anything else, consists as much in knowing what to omit as what to insist upon."

"One who is proud of ancestry is like a turnip; there is nothing good of him but that which is underground"

"Opinion governs all mankind, Like the blind's leading of the blind ."

"Or shear swine, all cry and no wool."

"Our choice is apparently most free, and we are least obviously driven to determine our course, in those cases where the future is most obscure, that is, when the balance of advantage appears most doubtful."

"Our ideas are for the most part like bad sixpences, and we spend our lives trying to pass them on one another."

"Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage."

"Our self-conceit sustains, and always must sustain us."

"Our world — like Noah's ark: a handful of people and lots of creatures."

"Painters should remember that the eye, as a general rule, is a good, simple, credulous organ - very ready to take things on trust if it be told them with any confidence of assertion."

"Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children."

"People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy."

"People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect."

"People say that there are neither dragons to be killed nor distressed maidens to be rescued nowadays. I do not know, but I think I have dropped across one or two, nor do I feel sure whether the most mortal wounds have been inflicted by the dragons or by myself."

"Poetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's."

"Prayers are to men as dolls are to children."

"Priests are not men of the world; it is not intended that they should be; and a University training is the one best adapted to prevent their becoming so."

"Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing."

"Propositions prey upon and are grounded upon one another just like living forms. They support one another as plants and animals do; they are based ultimately on credit, or faith, rather than the cash of irrefragable conviction. The whole universe is carried on on the credit system, and if the mutual confidence on which it is based were to collapse, it must itself collapse immediately. Just or unjust, it lives by faith; it is based on vague and impalpable opinion that by some inscrutable process passes into will and action, and is made manifest in matter and in flesh; it is meteoric — suspended in mid-air; it is the baseless fabric of a vision to vast, so vivid, and so gorgeous that no base can seem more broad than such stupendous baselessness, and yet any man can bring it about his ears by being over-curious; when faith fails, a system based on faith fails also."

"Rare virtues are like rare plants or animals, things that have not been able to hold their own in the world. A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but more durable metal."

"Reason might very possibly abolish the double currency; it might even attack the personality of Hope and Justice. Besides, people have such a strong natural bias towards it that they will seek it for themselves and act upon it quite as much as or more than is good for them: there is no need of encouraging reason. With unreason the case is different. She is the natural complement of reason, without whose existence reason itself were non- existent."

"Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes... in comparison with past time... what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?"

"Science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance."

"Self-preservation is the first law of nature."

"Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime."

"She that with poetry is won Is but a desk to write upon."

"Silence and tact may or may not be the same thing."

"Sin is like a mountain with two aspects according to whether it is viewed before or after it has been reached: yet both aspects are real."

"Sketching from nature is very like trying to put a pinch of salt on her tail. And yet many manage to do it very nicely."

"Slugs have ridden their contempt for defensive armour as much to death as the turtles their pursuit of it. They have hardly more than skin enough to hold themselves together; they court death every time they cross the road. Yet death comes not to them more than to the turtle, whose defences are so great that there is little left inside to be defended. Moreover, the slugs fare best in the long run, for turtles are dying out, while slugs are not, and there must be millions of slugs all over the world over for every single turtle."

"Some force whole regions, in despite O' geography, to change their site; Make former times shake hands with latter, And that which was before come after. But those that write in rhyme still make The one verse for the other's sake; For one for sense, and one for rhyme, I think 's sufficient at one time."